Speaker: Caleb Schrock-Hurst
Bible Passages: James 1:19-27; 2:14-19
Summary: We can’t just talk the talk — we need to walk the walk. Going through an acrostic, we talk about how we can live out our lives of faith in Jesus, as if emphasized in the book of James.
Good morning everyone, good to be with you. Thanks for bearing with me sitting down to preach, if you need to shift a little bit to actually see me, feel free to do so. I’m healing well from the surgery Friday 10 days ago — thanks for all the well wishes and the flowers sent from the church — but yeah, standing for 20 minutes is still mightily uncomfortable, so thanks for letting me sit down on the job. Steph pointed out to me yesterday how ironic it is that I’m preaching ‘walk the walk’ when I literally can’t walk…but oh well.
Anyhow — today I’m trying something a little different for my sermon — I’m taking a page out of Pastor Tig’s book and we’ll walk through an acronym together, like he did last week. I really appreciated his message on listening well, and using the idea that we need to be ‘Quick’ to listen.
Quiz time — do we remember what Quick stood for?
Questions (asking good questions) – Understanding (listening to understand, not respond) – Small ‘I’ (listening isn’t about us, but who we’re listening to) – Compassion (suffering with) – Kindness (being understanding of the feelings and issues of the person we’re talking with).
This message, that we need to be quick to listen, is really central in the book of James, one of my favorites. Before we get to our ‘walk the walk’ acronym, I want to do a little background on the book of James; and here I have Tig to thank again, because he wrote a good introduction to it last week but then cut it from his sermon to save time :) So, here’s a long-ish direct quote from pastor Tig.
“Most scholars believe that the James who wrote this letter is the James, the brother of Jesus, and he wrote this letter to Jewish Christians living outside of Palestine. One of the big themes is about putting Christian faith into action, that faith without works is worthless.
“Some people think James actually goes too far, that his teaching goes against the idea that we are saved by faith, not works. In fact, Martin Luther, whose main emphasis in the reformation was salvation through faith and not works, questioned why the book of James was even included in the Bible — he called it the “epistle of straw” because he believed it contradicted the apostle Paul’s teaching that salvation is by faith alone.
“On the other hand, a lot of Mennonites call it one of their favorite books, exactly because of its emphasis on putting faith into action, practicing what we preach; there are a lot of parallels between James and Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.”
So, as Tig mentioned, the main theme of James is active faith, and how faith without works is dead. This is a theme that Anabaptist-Mennonites really love — but it is indeed one that makes some Christians uncomfortable, particularly those who emphasize grace — though I don’t think these two ideas are incompatible.
I definitely support the classical protestant formula that Tig mentions above — we are saved by grace through faith; but, I think we should add the tag that James does — that faith without works is dead. James 2:17, one of the most quotable verses in the bible, says exactly that: “Faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.” Our faith in a loving God who desires goodness is worthless if we don’t live like that matters.
While we’re thinking formulas: today, in the West, we often think that belief is equal to faith; James, though, has a different equation in mind: rather than saying belief is equal to faith, he says beliefs plus actions are equal to a person’s faith. What someone does, in addition to what they believe, tells us what they really put their faith in. Or, as my brother put it rather succinctly in a song he wrote about the book of James, “what you do tells me what you believe in.”
And Jesus I think takes this position too — we can remind our fellow Christians that simply calling Jesus Lord, but then living lives that mistreat the poor, the marginalized, and the immigrants is just clearly not what the Jesus of scripture had in mind. We can’t just follow Jesus with our mouths — we have to follow him with our feet, and in our lives.
However — we can, as Mennonites, be too hard on ourselves and neglect grace; so, before I do focus on works with most of my sermon, I want to share a story about Luther’s concept of grace, actually shared in the book I mentioned in my last sermon, ‘EcoActivist Testament,’ by a Lutheran eco-theologian. The story goes that Luther, after delivering his sermon on Sunday, would go every week to the local tavern and drink a pint with friends from Church. (We can pause here to say we’re obviously not a Mennonite story already, right?) Anyhow, one Sunday, a guest who had traveled a long way to hear Luther preach on how we need to respond actively to God’s grace, came into the pub and asked: “Dr. Luther, after you’ve just preached such a rousing sermon challenging us to live lives of faith, how can you just sit there?” Luther responded, “as I drink this Wittenberg beer, the gospel runs its course.”
This story is a good reminder that even as we prioritize working for God, we don’t need to work all the time for the good news to be active: God’s grace is sufficient, and God is active even when we’re not. Jesus’ showed and taught us that God is a God of love and forgiveness, a God of grace, who desires mercy, not sacrifice. Though we work hard for the kingdom as much as possible, we also remain saved by the grace of God, not by our goodness, and it is a marvelous grace that extends far beyond the human limits we impose.
And, though we might not always realize it, this idea of grace and works also shows up meaningfully in the Old testament and in Jewish tradition; The talmud states that God’s followers are not responsible for completing the work of restoring shalom in the world, but they are responsible for trying; aka, we know we won’t completely solve the world’s problems, or live completely righteous lives, but we do have a responsibility to try to do so.
All this to say — as we talk about walking the walk of faith today, we can also keep in mind our firm foundation of God’s grace, sufficient for all, undergirding us in times of difficulty and sorrow. Jesus walks with us, suffers with us, and has saved us — now, we seek to follow him out of gratitude.
Okay — that’s plenty of introduction, let’s get to walk the walk. Of course, this is coming from the saying that we can’t just talk the talk, we also have to walk the walk — these are just some of the attitudes we need to have as Christians.
First we have W and A, and we’ll actually work with them together as Words and Actions
I have a slide here, if you can share that Junsuk.
This is from an online comic I really like, called xkcd. In case you can’t read it, a son comes up to his dad and asks: “Did you hear what he said about me?” The father responds — sticks and stones may break your bones, but words” and his son interrupts — “can make someone else feel happy or sad, which is literally the only thing that matters in this stupid world,” which stumps his dad. (https://xkcd.com/1216/)
This comic makes a great point — we all know the reality that words can, and often do, hurt us worse than actions. James also knows this, which is why his letter, focusing on living out our lives of faith, emphasizes we need to be slow to speak and quick to listen, because our words in our lives are a big part of how we interact with others.
But our words and actions also go together — we can’t just walk the walk or talk the talk — we have to do both, as James emphasizes. In fact, if we talk about loving or believing in something, but we live in ways that contradict what we say, we are the very definition of hypocritical — almost certainly doing more harm for the cause we talk about supporting than if we’d never talked about it in the first place.
As Christians, if we talk about following the prince of peace, Jesus, who loves all and came to save all, we have to live in a way compatible with this message, or we do the cause of Christ harm. Unfortunately, today there are many Christians who talk a lot about Jesus, but their lives don’t line up with their words. When Christian nationalists say they love Jesus and trust in him, but live lives built on fear, blaming problems on immigrants and ethnic minorities, we see the disconnect between their rhetoric and their action. We, instead, must connect our rhetoric to our actions, so that what we do reflects what we say.
But the connection can go the other way, too — what we say impacts what we do. Often, dehumanization of others in words leads to real world consequences — it doesn’t start with killing people, it starts with saying that it’s okay if some people are killed. These days, extreme rhetoric routinely dehumanizes other people, and it’s leading to violence. In the last year, Israeli Prime Minister Netenyahu has often said that Israel is fighting a war between civilization and barbarism — while he leads his country in demolishing cities, starving civilians, and choosing war: crimes which need to be named and treated as such. While our hearts break for the loss of life last year on October 7th — and we also condemn indiscriminate acts of violence by Hamas and other terrorist groups — it is our moral responsibility to speak and act for peace in all cases of violence against civilians. We need to call out hypocrisy — the gap between the walking and talking — even more amongst our erstwhile allies, particularly when they claim that violence will lead us to peace, when it obviously won’t.
In the same way, and perhaps closer to home, we have our election next month and can apply some of these lessons here. There is much outside our control — but we do have control over our own words and our own actions. Rather than dehumanize out of fear, let’s humanize, out of love; name your disagreements, even strongly, but also commit to peaceful disagreement and a desire for wholeness, the conversion of the opponent, not their destruction. Invite everyone on the journey of aligning their actions with their words. We want to align our words and actions with the way of Christ — hope in the midst of hopelessness, and love in the face of hate.
And we do so for at least two reasons, which I’ll paraphrase from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr: First, Violence is (1st) immoral, because it corrupts us and destroys our credibility, but also (2nd) ineffective — because it almost never leads to the peace we claim to seek.
Right now, we wonder what we can do to have a peaceful country and a peaceful world — and a big part of it is choosing to orient both our words and our actions to the way of Jesus, who prayed for forgiveness for the people who killed him, rather than asking they be punished.
Okay, next letter in ‘Walk,’ is L: Labor
How is labor different from actions? To explain, let’s go back to the reformation for a bit again, and discuss with some other Christian traditions. The Anabaptist tradition emphasizes that our allegiance to Jesus must be total — it means there will be some jobs, some labors, that are off-limits for Christians; that we need to align our working lives with the Christian way. On the other hand, some other traditions would argue that there are times when, in service of the Christian state, we don’t need to follow Jesus’s directives; that one set of standards applies to the private life, and another to the business, state, or corporate life.
This is a very brief introduction to how we can be tempted to separate personal morality — aka, how we treat our family and friends — from collective morality; that a Christian involved in, say, a country or company doing bad things, as long as they personally pray to Jesus and treat their friends well, don’t need to worry about what their labor is doing.
So, obviously, I think James is arguing against this separation between personal and corporate faiths — the type of faith-in-action that James is writing about isn’t one that is just about personal righteousness and right personal relationships, but also about our labor, how we live our lives, make our money, and live together.
As we walk the walk of our faiths, we need to try to align our labor with our faiths, not separating what we do on Sunday from what we do Monday to Friday.
Okay, next we have “K” — Knowledge
As we seek to live out our faiths, knowledge is important to keep in mind. Getting wisdom and understanding, learning how the world God created works, is an extremely good thing — we should seek out knowledge and understanding both of the natural world and of those we may fear, or not understand.
Two quick points about knowledge.
First, Knowledge can be used for the collective good, or it can be used for individual good. How about an example — let’s take a look at how the knowledge of how to make the life-saving drug insulin has been used. According to CNN, in 2023, before the Biden administration capped the price of insulin, insulin was manufactured for about $6 dollars a vial — but it was then sold to consumers for $300 dollars, a 4,900% markup. This is an example of knowledge — the knowledge of how to make a life-saving drug — not being used for good, but just for the sake of money. So, while we do seek out knowledge, we then need to be careful how to use it.
The second point I want to make about knowledge is that we live in a time when many people, including many Christians, have embraced anti-intellectualism, or a fear of scientific knowledge. This is a big topic and much could be said, but we shouldn’t be afraid of remembering that God wants us to acquire, and use, our knowledge in service of the kingdom. We are not somehow more faithful to God when we turn away from learning about the natural world, or other people — we instead should use our God-given intellect to learn about the world, acquiring knowledge and putting it to faithful use.
Here, I confess my own anger, particularly during Jacob’s funeral yesterday, at Christians who needlessly divide faith and science, creating unnecessary walls between God and people.
Okay, so we’ve had one walk — Words, Actions, Labor, and Knowledge — so we’re back to “w” — our second “w” is Wealth
I want to start here with an idea from Shane Claiborne, who visited our church with the ‘raw tools,’ guns-into-garden tools campaign a year or so ago. He likes to say — “Everyone likes you, as a Christian, until you start talking about money, violence, or sex.” I guess I’m not talking about sex today, so that’s good at least.
Claiborne also reminds us — if everybody likes you, you’re probably doing something wrong. So let’s think a second about money and how we use our wealth as part of the faithful Christian walk.
James also addresses this question straight on — the very first example James uses about putting faith in action, at the beginning of chapter two, between the two passages we heard, is about how we treat people in less fortunate circumstances than ourselves. Let me read that passage now: James 2:2-7.
2 Imagine two people coming into your meeting. One has a gold ring and fine clothes, while the other is poor, dressed in filthy rags. 3 Then suppose that you were to take special notice of the one wearing fine clothes, saying, “Here’s an excellent place. Sit here.” But to the poor person you say, “Stand over there”; or, “Here, sit at my feet.” 4 Wouldn’t you have shown favoritism among yourselves and become evil-minded judges? 5 My dear brothers and sisters, listen! Hasn’t God chosen those who are poor by worldly standards to be rich in terms of faith? Hasn’t God chosen the poor as heirs of the kingdom he has promised to those who love him? 6 But you have dishonored the poor. Don’t the wealthy make life difficult for you? Aren’t they the ones who drag you into court? 7 Aren’t they the ones who insult the good name spoken over you at your baptism?”
As we seek to walk the walk of our faiths, we need to find ways to have our worldly success, if it comes, not separate us from God or from the poor. We need to use our resources not just for our personal gain, but for the kingdom, and we need to be conscious of the fact that one of the most enduring human idols, the thing that many societies end up living for and worshiping, is money — and Jesus reminds us that we can’t serve both God and money.
Making money, and having money, is not inherently sinful — but serving money and wealth rather than Jesus’s kingdom, where our worth is determined by our belovedness, not our money, definitely is.
Okay — next “A” we have is Altruism
Altruism is a bit of a vocabulary word; altruism is when we help others and don’t expect anything in return — giving, and not expecting to be given anything back.
Part of walking the walk of our faiths is not simply rooting our good works in groups where we know that will be reciprocated — every society and religion and people group does that, even deeply immoral and bad people know how to manipulate others by giving some things in exchange for others. What we are called to is to love even the people that are hard to love; to give and live altruistically, even when we know we won’t get anything back. As Jesus puts it — if we only love those who love us, what more are we doing than the tax collectors and the pharisees?
Altruism also plays a key part in our traditional Anabaptist-Mennonite emphasis on pacifism and service. Part of loving our enemies is doing the right thing even when it comes at great personal cost — if we only love others, and only reject the weapons of war when it’s simple and easy and benefits us, are we really doing anything special?
Walking altruistically is loving others even when love doesn’t make sense — and part of the reason we do this is to show others that another way is possible. By living lives of faith, we show others that there is community and meaning beyond merely their own individual life and family. By living lives of simplicity, we challenge others to consider living more simply. By living lives of service abroad, we help others understand that it is possible to live in countries they may think are dangerous or too strange to understand. By committing to live non-violently, we challenge others to consider that you can survive as individuals and families and even people groups without resorting to violence. Through all this and more, as we walk the walk we show people Jesus’ way — we can can respond to hatred with blessing; we can respond to fear with hope.
This brings us to our final two letters, L and K — and we’ll work with these together: Love and Kindness
Love and kindness, though both speak for themselves, are actually a little different — I think of Love being about a long-term desire for wellbeing, and kindness as being short-term respect: of course we need to have both of these as Christians, but we also need to know that they can sometimes clash — sometimes love means we’ll have to do things that may be perceived as unkind.
It’s a classic example, but when comparing love and kindness, we can think of parents and children — it might seem unkind to put children in time out when they steal their siblings toys — but it is still the loving thing to do to teach them, long-term, what is healthy and right, even if they think we’re being unkind to them.
In the same way, as adults, we can challenge ourselves to step out of our comfort zones and confront — with kindness and love — systemic evils, like economic inequality, racism, and other forms of injustice. We accept God’s love — but it challenges us to action.
One other way to think about love, that my dad likes to emphasize, is that what we love is what we’re willing to suffer for — as we walk the Christian walk, we should be willing to suffer for one another and the long-term good, for the Shalom that Jesus pointed us toward.
Okay — we’ve made it through our Walk the Walk acronym; you’ll see it here on the screen, and it’s also on the back of your bulletin. I hope this sticks in your mind as you think about living out your faith.
I want to share just one more great verse from James — James 3:18 says that: When peacemakers plant seeds of peace, they will harvest justice; ie, that when we plant seeds of peace with our actions, when we walk the walk, we will harvest the fruits of that labor — when we live lives of kindness and love, we will reap kindness and love.
In response to the message today, we’re going to sing one of my favorite hymns, Will you let me be your servant. I love it for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that it emphasizes this idea that we need to live out our faith — being a servant to others, as Jesus was, isn’t just some intellectual endeavor: it’s often doing the non-glamorous, hard work of a servant that makes our lives together possible.
I picked this hymn with this theme in mind, obviously, but also with the knowledge of grief in our community — another part of walking the walk of Christian faith is weeping together when hard news comes, like we did with the Waltner’s yesterday and this week, and as we will in the coming months and years. We weep when others are weeping — we don’t just walk together in the easy, but also in the hard.
As we go today, remember we need to walk the walk — not just talking about a life of Christian love, but living one: a life where we remember that our words matter, that our actions reflect what we really believe in, where we use our daily labor for the common good rather than ourselves, and where knowledge is pursued, and then shared rather than hoarded. As Christians we also share our wealth with others, not always expecting things in return but living altruistically, even loving those who may hate us. And finally, we do all this, and more, with love and kindness, because God has shown us love and kindness first. May it be so.
